While I agree that economic freedom is a good thing, focusing on GDP growth instead of current GDP can lead to some pretty misleading conclusions. Internationally, Benin (in Africa) has a recent growth rate of 6% - much better than the US. Would you want to live there? (Nothing against Benin in particular, just I'd rather be in the US). Countries that are starting from really low GDP per capita points can show pretty spectacular growth as we see in the US in some of the red states. If you look at GDP per capita by state the top performers are New York, Massachusetts, Washington, California. Hardly a who's who of high growth rates, but that's where the money is.
Google the Kuznet's Curve. Basically, it predicts exactly what we see. The low GDP states tend to grow fast until they reach a certain level then growth slows. There are a lot of reasons for this including some of the ones that Hanania gives here, but it's pretty consistently observed and I'd be shocked if it didn't prove to be pretty durable in the case of the current low gdp, high growth states.
The problem with factoring in GDP per capita is that it rewards Blue States for making things unlivable for poor people. If someone who earns $40K a year moves from California to Texas, he increases GDP per capita in California and decreases it in Texas, even though no Texan has been made worse off. You might then look and say of course Texas is growing faster, they have a lower GDP per capita. But this should be considered a win for Texas and a loss for California. In fact, California has been shedding poor people and the middle class, which is good for GDP per capita.
If Red States keep creating opportunities for the working class and Blue States keep repelling them, Red States will never catch up in GDP per capita.
Note that the pattern is the opposite in the EU, as when they opened the borders, people moved towards the wealthier states. I'm unsure why you wouldn't expect the same here in America if our Blue States were actually well governed.
All good points. Having lived in one of the red states for years and now being in a very blue one, I'd be hesitant to call the red states well governed vs the blue states, but those are n=1 opinions. But, it might be worth noting that I specifically moved from my red state to a blue one for economic opportunity and found it in spades. Maybe that's last year's news though. There are certainly good reasons for the red states to be absorbing more people since they have tended to be much more open to building new housing (i.e. making things livable for poor people), but I'm still hesitant to throw Kuznet's Curve out the window just yet. As those red states become more prosperous will they tend to be more like the blue states in policy? That appears to be the case in some places e.g. Georgia, Virginia, New Hampshire.
Economic freedom in an overall sense may be beneficial but when you look at the details what it really means is the freedom to fuck ordinary people over and the nation for the benefit of multi national corporations. Not to mention where you have economic freedom you also get social freedom like degeneracy, low birth, rates weak families and demographic replacement. Data backs this up the most economically free countries are much more pro degeneracy than the least economically free countries.
There's this lie that free markets are right wing but in reality the result of free markets are anything but right wing. There's a reason the original free market people where actually considered left wing . Honestly I don't think that should have ever changed. Economic nationalism is right wing, not free markets. Free markets can be the center and communism can be the left
Hasn't been happening so far at all, yes it theoretically could happen in the future but so far people are still moving to Texas and Florida en masse even after.
It's true in many cases but it's only a part of the difference, definitely less than Half. Look at Miami, Tampa Bay metro, Houston, all of them have water that prevents them from building in all directions. They're all growing far faster than Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bakersfield, and Minneapolis, all blue state cities that have no Ocean or Great Lake around them to prevent expanding in every direction.
Economic freedom in an overall sense may be beneficial but when you look at the details what it really means is the freedom to fuck ordinary people over and the nation for the benefit of multi national corporations. Not to mention where you have economic freedom you also get social freedom like degeneracy, low birth, rates weak families and demographic replacement. Data backs this up the most economically free countries are much more pro degeneracy than the least economically free countries.
There's this lie that free markets are right wing but in reality the result of free markets are anything but right wing. There's a reason the original free market people where actually considered left wing . Honestly I don't think that should have ever changed. Economic nationalism is right wing, not free markets. Free markets can be the center and communism can be the left
I understand your concern about economic freedom: from a first world point of view it kind of makes sense, but I have to point out that if you look at the economic freedom index, you'll find that at the top of the list are some of the most egalitarian (and least degenerate) countries in the world: #2. Switzerland, #3. Ireland, #5 Luxembourg, #6 New Zealand, #8 Denmark, #9 Sweden, #10 Norway, #11 Netherlands. At the bottom of the list, you'll find mostly basket case countries that would easily meet your criteria of degeneracy. If you've got data that support a different case, then it would be worthwhile to see.
2. No data of Capitalism existing without a strong state.
3. Argentina is already running the experiment, shock therapy in Russian also failed.
" I think no country has gone beyond the optimal amount of capitalism because the exact same arguments against central planning that we apply towards communism work just as well against a mixed economy. If a purely communist state zaps the motivation to work hard, shouldn’t a mixed economy state do the same, just to a lesser degree? If you don’t believe that government should run the steel factories, why then should it run education? What about health care? Sure, you can come up with reasons why the latter two industries are different than most areas of the economy, but I don’t find the arguments very convincing. And if government-enforced cartels are bad in all other areas, what makes labor unions acceptable? I’m convinced that unions are so clearly offensive to the laws of economics that no one would defend them if they weren’t already established institutions."
4. Government is more efficient at running healthcare, there are some exceptions worldwide but for the most part the data comparing American and Canadian costs is very illuminating.
It'd be nice if you did this topic as an adversarial collaboration with someone smart who holds a more leftist stance. You can wave numbers around all day, but statistics can be manipulated and it takes an expert to really fact check them. I believe in economic libertarianism too, but I find the big picture stuff like communist states failing more convincing, because the small details can be endlessly manipulated by someone who knows what they're doing. Two opposed experts fact checking each other and producing a conclusion together would be great.
I think a steelman would be Silicon Valley - despite being in California; it still produces most tech companies by a large margin. Won't show much in terms of population change, but easy to make the argument that technological progress in this small area has positive externalities on the whole globe.
I think SV would enable even more growth with free market policies; but the fact it hasn't relocated (yet) suggest that network effects are (at least so far) more important than economic freedom.
CA may seem unfree relative to Arizona, but compared to Europe it's incredibly free. In particular it has very liberal working laws. Unenforceable non-competes are especially good for startups.
But, the location of Silicon Valley is partly just a coincidence. It's a success-begets-success sort of flywheel. The gap between US states in terms of economic freedom is much smaller than the gap between the US and Europe, or between Europe and China.
California really isn't left wing enough on economics for there to be any meaningful difference between red and blue here. It has been run by Republican governors for long stretches in the past, and when Silicon Valley was spinning up California was much more balanced with more Republican influence anyway.
Look at it this way - if leftism was the path to great tech firms then North Korea would dominate the internet. If you wanted to pick a place that is the exact economic opposite of North Korea in every way, you'd end up in a place like California with its at-will employment, relatively weak rights-and-benefits culture, bans on non-competes, and all the other factors that make the US more competitive like a relative lack of regulation and a tax code conducive to getting rich by making startups.
Again, the difference between California and Arizona here are just tiny and don't matter. The leftism in California is the modern kind, it's all cultural, not economic. When we look at the way they differentiate themselves it's things like abortion, trans stuff, not punishing crime and other things that aren't anything to do with classical leftism.
The usual explanation for why Silicon Valley is in California at all is that noncompete agreements are automatically void in California. This enforces one kind of economic freedom, the freedom to work at your chosen profession, by eliminating a different kind of freedom, the freedom to bargain your inherent freedom away. It's not obviously a problem for the all-economic-freedom model.
There have been recent developments in the legal status of noncompete agreements. It will be interesting to see what happens.
In fact, consider that SV enables a type of politics deeply unconcerned with mid-sized business regulation precisely because the industry is software IP, which doesn't run into the same per unit costs like car factories or grocery chains. Peter Thiel's Zero to One isn't some radical political manifesto, but a boring statement of how you pitch to VC's in 2015 on a business that could rapidly scale customers with nearly zero marginal cost except server load. No wonder California doesn't worry about its environmental regulations or minimum wage laws. They've done very well without worrying about those things before; why stop now?
An enormous factor in people moving out of California/NY to red states is the cost of housing. I would be willing to bet that this is by far the dominant effect.
It does tie into what you cover here, in that the fast growing red states have kept housing costs low by allowing plenty of new construction, whereas California/NYC housing prices have skyrocketed due to government imposed restrictions on new housing construction.
You could likely write a new version of this article at 1/3 the length by just focusing on housing costs.
I don’t know why restricting supply and burdensome government regulation would ruin just the housing market but not everything else where the same laws of economics apply. Seems liberals want to limit the discussion to housing to avoid that there’s something more fundamental wrong with how they understand the world.
No, it's the opposite. Conservatives want to stay away from the topic of housing because it demystifies this topic while depriving conservatives of a justification for their favorite past time (grinding the faces of the homeless).
People are leaving cities like NY primarily because of the cost of housing. Yet people only talk about taxes.
Red states (and some blue states) have more land and since in the US there's this prevalent idea that people should only live in single family detached houses, growth becomes a relatively easy low hanging fruit for the red states, while for blue states, getting anything built immediately invites backlash from existing residents.
In landuse policies, the red states are doubling down on the mistakes of the blue states, which is why they don't want to talk about housing. They are emotionally invested in shitty sprawl.
What is interesting about this is that FL is moving in a NIMBY direction even as CA is moving (slowly) in a YIMBY direction. While red states clearly are starting from a more YIMBY baseline thanks to stronger property rights and economic freedom, when the issue becomes salient it doesn’t break down on the expected partisan lines. In CA, almost all Republican state officials are NIMBYs.
Great post, but I think you might have got the causality in the wrong direction. Just by first principles, people in California are pushing the limits of physics in Santa Clara, creating the best-selling smartphones in Cupertino, and finding the best way to sell you ads in Menlo Park. It's just much harder to grow because they are the richest people on earth, and they need to push what means progress. People in Arizona can just get some uncle Sam checks and suddenly appears a Californian company (Intel) and a foreigner company (TSMC) to drop $80B in capex there and increase both their capital stock and productivity.
Let's run the numbers! Using your own taxonomy for the top twenty states in population (I wrote them down by glancing in your chart, so I may have written something wrong, but I dunno it matters), the average GDP per capita for a top 20 blue state is 30% higher than GDP per capita than average top 20 red states. The average GDP per capita for a top 20 purple state is 12% higher than for the average than the average top 20 red state. The numbers are similar using medians. I am too busy for finding historical data, but I bet $10 bucks the differences were even higher 10, 20, and 30 years ago.
At first glance, this seems like run-of-the-mill catch-up growth!
We can settle the debate easily. Just run a regression of the growth of U.S. states, their economic freedom, and their initial per capita GDPs. I am sure you'll see the initial per capita GDP is statistically significant.
Ok, does it mean that economic freedom policies don't work?
1- You might be getting the correlation in the opposite direction. Because the people of Indiana have a $60,000 GDP per capita, they envy the people of Massachusetts' wealth, and they elect politicians that will favor growth versus welfare.
2- The people of California know there isn't much Sacramento can't do for economic growth. But because they are rich af, they indulge themselves to elect politicians that will care about other stuff they think it's important, like $16 minimum wage, or gender neutral bathrooms.
3- Immigration is more of a factor of economic growth than total wealth. California is a great place if you're already rich, but maybe riding the tide that will lift boats in Phoenix or Austin is a better way to get rich.
I think it's a general stylized fact that people favor more welfare focused policies as they get rich. Just see the experience in far east Asia. The Koumitang was great to take Taiwan out of poverty. People accepted austerity in favor of a better future. But once this future arrived, people want a bit of welfare.
I may agree with you that if California were still governed by neoliberal types like Reagan, they'd be even richer. Obviously, their policies are a drag on growth. But I don't know if they'd be happier.
So you may agree that laissez-faire policies are better if you're (relatively) poor, but that you can afford yourself some vanities if you're rich.
The Kuomintang had to leave mainland China because they were kicked out by the Communists. That's supposed to be a radical egalitarian ideology, and multiple east Asian countries adopted it while poor. On the other hand, they did that via revolution rather than competitive elections (which Taiwan also didn't have for legislators still purporting to represent "rebellious provinces" on the mainland for decades).
2- Even the CCP is still to this day super austere. Life during the revolution was super spartan. I don't think you're making the point you think you're making.
That one offhand remark about Ezra Klein talking about blue state housing production problems could really be expanded into the entire rebuttal to this piece. I think this issue really falls under the "housing theory of everything." Population is following cheap housing. NIMBYism is a bipartisan issue in already-developed areas, but blue and red states diverge on housing productions because 1970s-style environmental conservationists ALSO block new greenfield development, while red states build lots and lots of shitty suburban sprawl that keeps housing prices down.
The fact that much of your data starts in the 1980s is consistent with the housing theory, because systematic under-production of housing (all over the country, but worse in blue states) began in the '70s.
Jane Jacobs "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" or Ed Glaeser's "The Triumph of the City" is a great way to think about this. Economies should be measured in cities, because they're the unit that actually generates developed economies, not resource extraction. So which city's metro areas are growing, and why? Some cities, like Atlanta, Salt Lake, or Austin have actually growing local economies. Others might just be attracting retirees and remote workers while still failing to build their own industrial base. You can bet they're all building more new housing than SF or Portland though.
The failure to produce housing is also a two-prong problem for lots of these blue cities. The rising prices themselves are losing emigrants and dissuading potential immigrants, but then they're also leading to evictions and homelessness, which causes more urban disorder and a "marketing" problem for attracting people. Price is probably the bigger problem in SF, while a city like Portland is still cheap enough (and has good climate/culture/walkability/convenient livable neighborhoods) that it should still be attracting more immigrants at its pricepoint imo, but its public image has been so horrible since 2020.
Both problems are addressed by building more housing. Cheaper prices would attract more people despite the disorder, and cheaper prices would also reduce disorder. There are plenty of drug addicts and criminals and low-functioning social deviants in red states too - they're just more likely to be able to afford some crappy old rundown place to live in a slummy neighborhood or squat in an abandoned warehouse or whatever.
This only explains part of the problem, because while housing is an important part of living costs, it’s not the only cost when it comes to “lifestyle”. Especially once households get richer, things like leisure and recreation become more important purchases. For example, it’s cheaper to live in Kansas City than Boulder, but if “the good life” involves me skiing 20+ times a season, then you’re probably better off in the Centenial State.
I might be way off on this, but I think this if the reason why California and NY are still so expensive, because they’re just so dang desirable.
it's both. ~20,000 housing units a year for Austin, a city of 800,000 is solid. That being roughly how much NYC, an 8 million person city, also builds is horseshit. Housing Theory of Everything has a strong case for NY imo. Extra emphasis on crime for Cali
Even in red states, cities tend to be blue. So the main NIMBY problem is from the blue side by far. Is there a single metro of say 1m+ that doesn’t tilt blue at this point?
Also, cheap housing is only good if there are also job opportunities.
Red states often do act as a check on blue city insanity, by say banning rent control and protecting owners’ rights statewide.
I'm pretty convinced of the "housing theory of everything" theory, and that any difference between red states and blue states on any policy difference other than housing is just completely dominated by the overwhelming importance of housing policy.
To get equivalent revenue, they have a high sales tax. Maybe this supports the theory that taxing consumption is best because it encourages reinvestment?
Re: the pandemic. It’s probably work from home rather than a lot of people people getting fed up with their government. They wanted to move before, but were tied to a job. After the pandemic, their job was no longer tied to a specific place. This explains why higher-income people began leaving at higher rates. (To be sure, that explanation is consistent with your overall argument, but it’s more of a technological shock story than a “people finally realizing how bad their government is” story.)
San Francisco and California both have one-party rule and enormous budgets. If Democrat policies worked, shouldn't they be exemplars? Instead, they are known for inability to build & major homeless/drug problems, with both afflictions well beyond the scale of other states, especially given the demographics.
That feels like a very significant point against their policies which I have not seen addressed. Does anyone know what the steelman position would respond?
I can imagine the following objections
* They would disagree with the characterization as being a right-wing narrative. Yet then you can point to actual data on building projects & social outcomes, beyond the enormous number of anecdotes about San Francisco in particular.
* They would say that every place has its problems and they would rather have those than the poor people on Florida and Texas who lack guaranteed access to abortion. Yet this argument has nothing to say about the economic policies.
* They would point to the fact that CA and SF are enormously wealthy and claim credit for the success. In my view, it is more likely to be a resource curse where govt expanded rapidly AFTER the major success in attracting population with weather and after Silicon Valley was established, and the govt can afford to be so bad exactly because of the successful people & companies there. (I am least certain about this)
Sure. The argument is that drug users and the poor move to California because they can get access to resources there. So it’s a free rider problem.
This seems to not actually be especially true in the stats though the homeless I’ve talked to in SF were not from California so I am dubious of the stats. But anecdote ain’t data.
Might also be a case where in some places like the suburbs the police kick out the homeless and open drug users while SF for some stupid reason refuses to do anything about them so they’re everywhere.
Inability to build is a US problem but yeah WAY worse in California and entirely due to policies that fall under “Leftist” by this article’s definition.
Inability to build at the small scale is also fueling homelessness and slowing economic growth. Partly due to California’s property tax law being the opposite of good tax policy. Mostly due to local governments refusing to allow high density housing without useless stipulations like “affordable housing”.
Jesus Christ. I’ve seen groups offer clean needles which seems fine to me - reduce the spread of AIDS and hep C - but providing paraphernalia and cash? The goal has to be harm reduction and a path to sobriety not support of the habit itself.
It seems like people follow very straightforward incentives. Even in retrospect it seems obvious that more homeless will show up if you give them free cash and rooms or whatever. And on the margin, it doesn't seem implausible that at-risk youths who have a fork in the road -- menial / low-level job vs paid to do drugs on the street, choose the street instead. Or at least don't fight as hard against that outcome.
The even crazier thing is that there's no sign that they recognize the issues and want to change course. Instead you have the politicians responding on X that it's the natural state of the city and without their policies it would be even worse. What a difference from a business where you need to quickly respond to real-world feedback and get to good outcomes!
I think this is self-correcting in long term - eventually these people OD and die. One wonders whether, at some level, the people handing out drugs consider that the point. Or maybe I'm just a sociopath projecting.
Suburbs vs cities doesn't explain differences in homeless rates by state. Poor red states tend to have lower rates than rich blue states, with the most likely explanation being cheaper housing.
Sorry I meant suburbs as an example of places even in homeless-ridden areas that are free of homelessness because the police actually kick them out. States can do the same thing and red states are more interested in suppressing crime in general.
From other comments here, now I think the major cause is local governments incentivizing drug addicts and homeless to occupy cities.
I don't think there really is much of a good argument against this, liberals obviously don't actually govern the way they say they want to. I would add though that NIMBYism happens more often in blue counties because that's where the economic growth is. As the population of Texas grows I imagine we will see it get more blue and more NIMBY, eventually driving up the housing costs to California levels. When someone is going to build a manufacturing plant in Mississippi, they cheer. When someone wants to build it in California they protest. Some of that is environmentalism, but a lot is just that one place is poorer.
Go read any discussion of SF on Hacker News (a startup oriented discussion forum dominated by the Bay Area set), and you will see every possible justification and then some. And also people arguing the other way around.
All those arguments you raise do get made, along with "the homeless come here for the weather".
Interesting. Note that GDP gap between US and Europe widened and accelerated after 2008, when the U.S. basically re-adopted Keynes whereas Europe was stuck with Reaganist thinking.
But in some ways it is true that Europe is now more neoliberal than the US. See Thomas Philippon’s book The Great Reversal. (He thinks that this is bad for America, btw.)
stuck with Reaganist thinking? Such as? Perhaps you're referring to deficit spending. But as Richard's analysis shows, there's more to economic policy than that.
I would think so, the German and French bonds were selling at 1% or something ridiculous when stimulus was needed. Later on when there was a depression looming on securities, the European Central bank went on wilder spending spree even than the Fed I believe. It was called "Quantitative Easing", not "stimulus", and interest rates were even more ridiculous (even negative at times).
The takeaway is that if you spend public funds for capital markets (i.e. for the rich), then there is no problem. It's when you spend for the poor, especially if Greek, that all of a sudden a lot intra-european racism and hawkish ideology made it impossible to have a decent stimulus, while the U.S steamed ahead out of its recession.
But, Covid + Putin and seemingly better U.S. policies may have changed views quite a bit since then.
As an European from an ex Communist country and a clear-eyed capitalist who actually works as a lobbyist for an American company in Brussels. The best balance is between US and Europe. There are elements that should be left to the state (US healthcare costs on average 2x more than European with similar outcomes while countries like Belgium are miles ahead of US on healthcare), there are areas where more regulation is needed (such as actual pollution from factories for example), as well as on individual protection (such as from cold-callers which we dont have at all or ridiculous American personal finance system with high charges and shit services or from shit food that makes Americans crazy obese). On the other side Europe needs much more economic freedom on personal bankruptcy, financial markets and overall less regulation. We also need to find a way to attract actually useful immigrants. Finding the balance is hard. But focus on GDP and population growth only is ridicolous. Alabama might have higher GDP than Belgium, but find me one actually educated person who would live in Birmingham, Alabama versus Antwerp or Brussels. Add to that lower crime rates, longer life spans, higher happiness accounts and realistically, just more fucking style, and there are things US could learn too. So give me balance between the two, and u got yourself a perfect country.
Your comment about labor unions makes sense for government protected unions. But without government protection, aren't labor unions a natural part of a free economy? Why can bosses associate freely, but workers can't?
That’s not how private sector unions work. Government prevents businesses from firing them and forces them to deal with the union cartel. Unions are unworkable under freedom of association. And bosses can’t associate freely, the law prevents business cartels working together.
Right, but what if the government *didn't* prevent businesses from firing them and such? Ie, what if the government didn't recognize unions at all? When unions began, they weren't recognized by the government.
What I mean is, in a free economy, can't workers organize themselves and plan collective action with no government sanction?
I’d allow them to do it, but in the real world they just don’t work without government favoritism. Show me current societies where unions work without government sanction.
If a union can capture the state, it will. Just like how big businesses all sought to receive government incorporation. This doesn't mean big business is impossible without government favoritism, but rather the opposite, business did so well that it received legal concessions.
So no, I can't show you current societies where unions have been successful but received no protections. But look at the achievements, for example, of the wobblies in the first decades of the 20th century.
The market for wages doesn't function the way the market for goods and services does. If I want to maximize my earnings, I would need to be willing to move every couple of years, uprooting my family and forcing my spouse to leave their job as well. We can't maximize our wages without lowering our over-all life happiness. That's why having unions is critical to balancing the scales, and why it can actually improve business by lowering turnover, which is costly.
> shouldn't you also support making legal parenthood--and thus child support--completely voluntary? After all, forcing someone to be a child's legal parent when they never had any intent or desire to be/become one also violates freedom of association, does it not?
This is off. Parenting is already completely voluntary. Child support will be forcibly taken if they can find you, and transmitted to the other parent, but this isn't characterized as an associational concern and doesn't have the characteristics of one.
Leftist politicies are not designed to improve the average standard of living, they are designed to improve the standard of living for the worst-off. These people contribute least to GDP and are least likely to be able to vote with their feet, but their lives still matter. From the leftist's perspective, this whole analysis misses the point because it judges leftist political projects by rightist standards of success.
Of course if you could show that the worst-off Americans do in fact move states as often as the median American, or otherwise demonstrate that leftist politicies are failing in their goals of protecting the vulnerable, that could be a conversation. In fact I am confident you could show that, and that a leftist could find problems with that analysis, and so on. To some extent this is a philosophical difference, but without analyzing the effects of policies on the worst-off, this analysis is unlikely to be persuasive to anyone with even moderately bleeding-heart sensibilities
But the bottom 20% are clearly better of in Europe then USA by simple measurements like how long they live. It not possible to compare on pure economic measures when reasonable universal healthcare is so important.
Also lot less likely to get shot or killed in car accident in Europe.
California used to be Republican leaning. In Carl Oglesby's "The Yankee and Cowboy War", California would be in the cowboy coalition with Texas. As the Texan economy & population grows, it could go the way of California. Garett Jones has been commenting on that happening in Virginia/North Carolina due to population movement. https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1780639908756881853
> If you don’t believe that government should run the steel factories, why then should it run education?
One possible argument is that even private education isn't socially valuable.
> What about health care?
The argument for the NHS that since health spending (public or private) is mostly wasteful, might as well just enforce cheapness.
While I agree that economic freedom is a good thing, focusing on GDP growth instead of current GDP can lead to some pretty misleading conclusions. Internationally, Benin (in Africa) has a recent growth rate of 6% - much better than the US. Would you want to live there? (Nothing against Benin in particular, just I'd rather be in the US). Countries that are starting from really low GDP per capita points can show pretty spectacular growth as we see in the US in some of the red states. If you look at GDP per capita by state the top performers are New York, Massachusetts, Washington, California. Hardly a who's who of high growth rates, but that's where the money is.
Google the Kuznet's Curve. Basically, it predicts exactly what we see. The low GDP states tend to grow fast until they reach a certain level then growth slows. There are a lot of reasons for this including some of the ones that Hanania gives here, but it's pretty consistently observed and I'd be shocked if it didn't prove to be pretty durable in the case of the current low gdp, high growth states.
The problem with factoring in GDP per capita is that it rewards Blue States for making things unlivable for poor people. If someone who earns $40K a year moves from California to Texas, he increases GDP per capita in California and decreases it in Texas, even though no Texan has been made worse off. You might then look and say of course Texas is growing faster, they have a lower GDP per capita. But this should be considered a win for Texas and a loss for California. In fact, California has been shedding poor people and the middle class, which is good for GDP per capita.
If Red States keep creating opportunities for the working class and Blue States keep repelling them, Red States will never catch up in GDP per capita.
Note that the pattern is the opposite in the EU, as when they opened the borders, people moved towards the wealthier states. I'm unsure why you wouldn't expect the same here in America if our Blue States were actually well governed.
All good points. Having lived in one of the red states for years and now being in a very blue one, I'd be hesitant to call the red states well governed vs the blue states, but those are n=1 opinions. But, it might be worth noting that I specifically moved from my red state to a blue one for economic opportunity and found it in spades. Maybe that's last year's news though. There are certainly good reasons for the red states to be absorbing more people since they have tended to be much more open to building new housing (i.e. making things livable for poor people), but I'm still hesitant to throw Kuznet's Curve out the window just yet. As those red states become more prosperous will they tend to be more like the blue states in policy? That appears to be the case in some places e.g. Georgia, Virginia, New Hampshire.
Yes, that’s the danger.
Economic freedom in an overall sense may be beneficial but when you look at the details what it really means is the freedom to fuck ordinary people over and the nation for the benefit of multi national corporations. Not to mention where you have economic freedom you also get social freedom like degeneracy, low birth, rates weak families and demographic replacement. Data backs this up the most economically free countries are much more pro degeneracy than the least economically free countries.
There's this lie that free markets are right wing but in reality the result of free markets are anything but right wing. There's a reason the original free market people where actually considered left wing . Honestly I don't think that should have ever changed. Economic nationalism is right wing, not free markets. Free markets can be the center and communism can be the left
Hasn't been happening so far at all, yes it theoretically could happen in the future but so far people are still moving to Texas and Florida en masse even after.
It's true in many cases but it's only a part of the difference, definitely less than Half. Look at Miami, Tampa Bay metro, Houston, all of them have water that prevents them from building in all directions. They're all growing far faster than Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bakersfield, and Minneapolis, all blue state cities that have no Ocean or Great Lake around them to prevent expanding in every direction.
Economic freedom in an overall sense may be beneficial but when you look at the details what it really means is the freedom to fuck ordinary people over and the nation for the benefit of multi national corporations. Not to mention where you have economic freedom you also get social freedom like degeneracy, low birth, rates weak families and demographic replacement. Data backs this up the most economically free countries are much more pro degeneracy than the least economically free countries.
There's this lie that free markets are right wing but in reality the result of free markets are anything but right wing. There's a reason the original free market people where actually considered left wing . Honestly I don't think that should have ever changed. Economic nationalism is right wing, not free markets. Free markets can be the center and communism can be the left
I understand your concern about economic freedom: from a first world point of view it kind of makes sense, but I have to point out that if you look at the economic freedom index, you'll find that at the top of the list are some of the most egalitarian (and least degenerate) countries in the world: #2. Switzerland, #3. Ireland, #5 Luxembourg, #6 New Zealand, #8 Denmark, #9 Sweden, #10 Norway, #11 Netherlands. At the bottom of the list, you'll find mostly basket case countries that would easily meet your criteria of degeneracy. If you've got data that support a different case, then it would be worthwhile to see.
1. China is missing in the data.
2. No data of Capitalism existing without a strong state.
3. Argentina is already running the experiment, shock therapy in Russian also failed.
" I think no country has gone beyond the optimal amount of capitalism because the exact same arguments against central planning that we apply towards communism work just as well against a mixed economy. If a purely communist state zaps the motivation to work hard, shouldn’t a mixed economy state do the same, just to a lesser degree? If you don’t believe that government should run the steel factories, why then should it run education? What about health care? Sure, you can come up with reasons why the latter two industries are different than most areas of the economy, but I don’t find the arguments very convincing. And if government-enforced cartels are bad in all other areas, what makes labor unions acceptable? I’m convinced that unions are so clearly offensive to the laws of economics that no one would defend them if they weren’t already established institutions."
4. Government is more efficient at running healthcare, there are some exceptions worldwide but for the most part the data comparing American and Canadian costs is very illuminating.
It'd be nice if you did this topic as an adversarial collaboration with someone smart who holds a more leftist stance. You can wave numbers around all day, but statistics can be manipulated and it takes an expert to really fact check them. I believe in economic libertarianism too, but I find the big picture stuff like communist states failing more convincing, because the small details can be endlessly manipulated by someone who knows what they're doing. Two opposed experts fact checking each other and producing a conclusion together would be great.
I don’t think I know any smart leftists who’re authoritarians even though most of the Left leans that way today.
It's neither "fake" nor "easily manipulable" if you even know even the core basics
I think a steelman would be Silicon Valley - despite being in California; it still produces most tech companies by a large margin. Won't show much in terms of population change, but easy to make the argument that technological progress in this small area has positive externalities on the whole globe.
I think SV would enable even more growth with free market policies; but the fact it hasn't relocated (yet) suggest that network effects are (at least so far) more important than economic freedom.
CA may seem unfree relative to Arizona, but compared to Europe it's incredibly free. In particular it has very liberal working laws. Unenforceable non-competes are especially good for startups.
But, the location of Silicon Valley is partly just a coincidence. It's a success-begets-success sort of flywheel. The gap between US states in terms of economic freedom is much smaller than the gap between the US and Europe, or between Europe and China.
OFC it's all a big coincidence that virtually all big innovation achievements of your lifetime happened in the blue states.
Nothing to do with red states being repressive theocratic wanna be hell holes. That part never makes it into the "FReEdUms" equation somehow
California really isn't left wing enough on economics for there to be any meaningful difference between red and blue here. It has been run by Republican governors for long stretches in the past, and when Silicon Valley was spinning up California was much more balanced with more Republican influence anyway.
Look at it this way - if leftism was the path to great tech firms then North Korea would dominate the internet. If you wanted to pick a place that is the exact economic opposite of North Korea in every way, you'd end up in a place like California with its at-will employment, relatively weak rights-and-benefits culture, bans on non-competes, and all the other factors that make the US more competitive like a relative lack of regulation and a tax code conducive to getting rich by making startups.
Again, the difference between California and Arizona here are just tiny and don't matter. The leftism in California is the modern kind, it's all cultural, not economic. When we look at the way they differentiate themselves it's things like abortion, trans stuff, not punishing crime and other things that aren't anything to do with classical leftism.
The usual explanation for why Silicon Valley is in California at all is that noncompete agreements are automatically void in California. This enforces one kind of economic freedom, the freedom to work at your chosen profession, by eliminating a different kind of freedom, the freedom to bargain your inherent freedom away. It's not obviously a problem for the all-economic-freedom model.
There have been recent developments in the legal status of noncompete agreements. It will be interesting to see what happens.
In fact, consider that SV enables a type of politics deeply unconcerned with mid-sized business regulation precisely because the industry is software IP, which doesn't run into the same per unit costs like car factories or grocery chains. Peter Thiel's Zero to One isn't some radical political manifesto, but a boring statement of how you pitch to VC's in 2015 on a business that could rapidly scale customers with nearly zero marginal cost except server load. No wonder California doesn't worry about its environmental regulations or minimum wage laws. They've done very well without worrying about those things before; why stop now?
An enormous factor in people moving out of California/NY to red states is the cost of housing. I would be willing to bet that this is by far the dominant effect.
It does tie into what you cover here, in that the fast growing red states have kept housing costs low by allowing plenty of new construction, whereas California/NYC housing prices have skyrocketed due to government imposed restrictions on new housing construction.
You could likely write a new version of this article at 1/3 the length by just focusing on housing costs.
I don’t know why restricting supply and burdensome government regulation would ruin just the housing market but not everything else where the same laws of economics apply. Seems liberals want to limit the discussion to housing to avoid that there’s something more fundamental wrong with how they understand the world.
No, it's the opposite. Conservatives want to stay away from the topic of housing because it demystifies this topic while depriving conservatives of a justification for their favorite past time (grinding the faces of the homeless).
People are leaving cities like NY primarily because of the cost of housing. Yet people only talk about taxes.
Red states (and some blue states) have more land and since in the US there's this prevalent idea that people should only live in single family detached houses, growth becomes a relatively easy low hanging fruit for the red states, while for blue states, getting anything built immediately invites backlash from existing residents.
In landuse policies, the red states are doubling down on the mistakes of the blue states, which is why they don't want to talk about housing. They are emotionally invested in shitty sprawl.
What is interesting about this is that FL is moving in a NIMBY direction even as CA is moving (slowly) in a YIMBY direction. While red states clearly are starting from a more YIMBY baseline thanks to stronger property rights and economic freedom, when the issue becomes salient it doesn’t break down on the expected partisan lines. In CA, almost all Republican state officials are NIMBYs.
Ironically, it's economic libertarianism (Prop 13) that encourages high housing costs in California.
Edit needed: “People want to live where in dry places where the sun is shining.”
Thanks
Great post, but I think you might have got the causality in the wrong direction. Just by first principles, people in California are pushing the limits of physics in Santa Clara, creating the best-selling smartphones in Cupertino, and finding the best way to sell you ads in Menlo Park. It's just much harder to grow because they are the richest people on earth, and they need to push what means progress. People in Arizona can just get some uncle Sam checks and suddenly appears a Californian company (Intel) and a foreigner company (TSMC) to drop $80B in capex there and increase both their capital stock and productivity.
Let's run the numbers! Using your own taxonomy for the top twenty states in population (I wrote them down by glancing in your chart, so I may have written something wrong, but I dunno it matters), the average GDP per capita for a top 20 blue state is 30% higher than GDP per capita than average top 20 red states. The average GDP per capita for a top 20 purple state is 12% higher than for the average than the average top 20 red state. The numbers are similar using medians. I am too busy for finding historical data, but I bet $10 bucks the differences were even higher 10, 20, and 30 years ago.
At first glance, this seems like run-of-the-mill catch-up growth!
We can settle the debate easily. Just run a regression of the growth of U.S. states, their economic freedom, and their initial per capita GDPs. I am sure you'll see the initial per capita GDP is statistically significant.
Ok, does it mean that economic freedom policies don't work?
1- You might be getting the correlation in the opposite direction. Because the people of Indiana have a $60,000 GDP per capita, they envy the people of Massachusetts' wealth, and they elect politicians that will favor growth versus welfare.
2- The people of California know there isn't much Sacramento can't do for economic growth. But because they are rich af, they indulge themselves to elect politicians that will care about other stuff they think it's important, like $16 minimum wage, or gender neutral bathrooms.
3- Immigration is more of a factor of economic growth than total wealth. California is a great place if you're already rich, but maybe riding the tide that will lift boats in Phoenix or Austin is a better way to get rich.
I think it's a general stylized fact that people favor more welfare focused policies as they get rich. Just see the experience in far east Asia. The Koumitang was great to take Taiwan out of poverty. People accepted austerity in favor of a better future. But once this future arrived, people want a bit of welfare.
I may agree with you that if California were still governed by neoliberal types like Reagan, they'd be even richer. Obviously, their policies are a drag on growth. But I don't know if they'd be happier.
So you may agree that laissez-faire policies are better if you're (relatively) poor, but that you can afford yourself some vanities if you're rich.
The Kuomintang had to leave mainland China because they were kicked out by the Communists. That's supposed to be a radical egalitarian ideology, and multiple east Asian countries adopted it while poor. On the other hand, they did that via revolution rather than competitive elections (which Taiwan also didn't have for legislators still purporting to represent "rebellious provinces" on the mainland for decades).
1- You're addressing a super tangential point.
2- Even the CCP is still to this day super austere. Life during the revolution was super spartan. I don't think you're making the point you think you're making.
That one offhand remark about Ezra Klein talking about blue state housing production problems could really be expanded into the entire rebuttal to this piece. I think this issue really falls under the "housing theory of everything." Population is following cheap housing. NIMBYism is a bipartisan issue in already-developed areas, but blue and red states diverge on housing productions because 1970s-style environmental conservationists ALSO block new greenfield development, while red states build lots and lots of shitty suburban sprawl that keeps housing prices down.
The fact that much of your data starts in the 1980s is consistent with the housing theory, because systematic under-production of housing (all over the country, but worse in blue states) began in the '70s.
Jane Jacobs "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" or Ed Glaeser's "The Triumph of the City" is a great way to think about this. Economies should be measured in cities, because they're the unit that actually generates developed economies, not resource extraction. So which city's metro areas are growing, and why? Some cities, like Atlanta, Salt Lake, or Austin have actually growing local economies. Others might just be attracting retirees and remote workers while still failing to build their own industrial base. You can bet they're all building more new housing than SF or Portland though.
The failure to produce housing is also a two-prong problem for lots of these blue cities. The rising prices themselves are losing emigrants and dissuading potential immigrants, but then they're also leading to evictions and homelessness, which causes more urban disorder and a "marketing" problem for attracting people. Price is probably the bigger problem in SF, while a city like Portland is still cheap enough (and has good climate/culture/walkability/convenient livable neighborhoods) that it should still be attracting more immigrants at its pricepoint imo, but its public image has been so horrible since 2020.
Both problems are addressed by building more housing. Cheaper prices would attract more people despite the disorder, and cheaper prices would also reduce disorder. There are plenty of drug addicts and criminals and low-functioning social deviants in red states too - they're just more likely to be able to afford some crappy old rundown place to live in a slummy neighborhood or squat in an abandoned warehouse or whatever.
tl;dr: it's the housing market, stupid.
This only explains part of the problem, because while housing is an important part of living costs, it’s not the only cost when it comes to “lifestyle”. Especially once households get richer, things like leisure and recreation become more important purchases. For example, it’s cheaper to live in Kansas City than Boulder, but if “the good life” involves me skiing 20+ times a season, then you’re probably better off in the Centenial State.
I might be way off on this, but I think this if the reason why California and NY are still so expensive, because they’re just so dang desirable.
it's both. ~20,000 housing units a year for Austin, a city of 800,000 is solid. That being roughly how much NYC, an 8 million person city, also builds is horseshit. Housing Theory of Everything has a strong case for NY imo. Extra emphasis on crime for Cali
Even in red states, cities tend to be blue. So the main NIMBY problem is from the blue side by far. Is there a single metro of say 1m+ that doesn’t tilt blue at this point?
Also, cheap housing is only good if there are also job opportunities.
Red states often do act as a check on blue city insanity, by say banning rent control and protecting owners’ rights statewide.
I'm pretty convinced of the "housing theory of everything" theory, and that any difference between red states and blue states on any policy difference other than housing is just completely dominated by the overwhelming importance of housing policy.
Washington is the only blue state with no income tax. That helps explain its anomalously high growth.
To get equivalent revenue, they have a high sales tax. Maybe this supports the theory that taxing consumption is best because it encourages reinvestment?
Re: the pandemic. It’s probably work from home rather than a lot of people people getting fed up with their government. They wanted to move before, but were tied to a job. After the pandemic, their job was no longer tied to a specific place. This explains why higher-income people began leaving at higher rates. (To be sure, that explanation is consistent with your overall argument, but it’s more of a technological shock story than a “people finally realizing how bad their government is” story.)
Genuine question, related to the article -
San Francisco and California both have one-party rule and enormous budgets. If Democrat policies worked, shouldn't they be exemplars? Instead, they are known for inability to build & major homeless/drug problems, with both afflictions well beyond the scale of other states, especially given the demographics.
That feels like a very significant point against their policies which I have not seen addressed. Does anyone know what the steelman position would respond?
I can imagine the following objections
* They would disagree with the characterization as being a right-wing narrative. Yet then you can point to actual data on building projects & social outcomes, beyond the enormous number of anecdotes about San Francisco in particular.
* They would say that every place has its problems and they would rather have those than the poor people on Florida and Texas who lack guaranteed access to abortion. Yet this argument has nothing to say about the economic policies.
* They would point to the fact that CA and SF are enormously wealthy and claim credit for the success. In my view, it is more likely to be a resource curse where govt expanded rapidly AFTER the major success in attracting population with weather and after Silicon Valley was established, and the govt can afford to be so bad exactly because of the successful people & companies there. (I am least certain about this)
Anyone know?
Sure. The argument is that drug users and the poor move to California because they can get access to resources there. So it’s a free rider problem.
This seems to not actually be especially true in the stats though the homeless I’ve talked to in SF were not from California so I am dubious of the stats. But anecdote ain’t data.
Might also be a case where in some places like the suburbs the police kick out the homeless and open drug users while SF for some stupid reason refuses to do anything about them so they’re everywhere.
Inability to build is a US problem but yeah WAY worse in California and entirely due to policies that fall under “Leftist” by this article’s definition.
Inability to build at the small scale is also fueling homelessness and slowing economic growth. Partly due to California’s property tax law being the opposite of good tax policy. Mostly due to local governments refusing to allow high density housing without useless stipulations like “affordable housing”.
On the topic
https://www.piratewires.com/p/downtown-is-for-drug-users-san-francisco-tourism-homelessness?f=home
Jesus Christ. I’ve seen groups offer clean needles which seems fine to me - reduce the spread of AIDS and hep C - but providing paraphernalia and cash? The goal has to be harm reduction and a path to sobriety not support of the habit itself.
It seems like people follow very straightforward incentives. Even in retrospect it seems obvious that more homeless will show up if you give them free cash and rooms or whatever. And on the margin, it doesn't seem implausible that at-risk youths who have a fork in the road -- menial / low-level job vs paid to do drugs on the street, choose the street instead. Or at least don't fight as hard against that outcome.
The even crazier thing is that there's no sign that they recognize the issues and want to change course. Instead you have the politicians responding on X that it's the natural state of the city and without their policies it would be even worse. What a difference from a business where you need to quickly respond to real-world feedback and get to good outcomes!
I think this is self-correcting in long term - eventually these people OD and die. One wonders whether, at some level, the people handing out drugs consider that the point. Or maybe I'm just a sociopath projecting.
Suburbs vs cities doesn't explain differences in homeless rates by state. Poor red states tend to have lower rates than rich blue states, with the most likely explanation being cheaper housing.
Sorry I meant suburbs as an example of places even in homeless-ridden areas that are free of homelessness because the police actually kick them out. States can do the same thing and red states are more interested in suppressing crime in general.
From other comments here, now I think the major cause is local governments incentivizing drug addicts and homeless to occupy cities.
I don't think there really is much of a good argument against this, liberals obviously don't actually govern the way they say they want to. I would add though that NIMBYism happens more often in blue counties because that's where the economic growth is. As the population of Texas grows I imagine we will see it get more blue and more NIMBY, eventually driving up the housing costs to California levels. When someone is going to build a manufacturing plant in Mississippi, they cheer. When someone wants to build it in California they protest. Some of that is environmentalism, but a lot is just that one place is poorer.
Go read any discussion of SF on Hacker News (a startup oriented discussion forum dominated by the Bay Area set), and you will see every possible justification and then some. And also people arguing the other way around.
All those arguments you raise do get made, along with "the homeless come here for the weather".
Interesting. Note that GDP gap between US and Europe widened and accelerated after 2008, when the U.S. basically re-adopted Keynes whereas Europe was stuck with Reaganist thinking.
"American capitalism is terrible! European social democracy is so much better!"
"But America is much richer than most of Europe"
"Oh uhm actually that's because America is Keynesian and Europe is Reaganite"
But in some ways it is true that Europe is now more neoliberal than the US. See Thomas Philippon’s book The Great Reversal. (He thinks that this is bad for America, btw.)
I've seen this claim repeated a lot. Are you saying that:
a) European countries responded to recessions with lower spending than the US?
b) European countries responded to recessions with lower deficits than the US?
c) European countries have lower spending in general than the US?
d) European countries have lower deficits in general than the US?
All four claims are false, so I'm curious to learn what this "Europe is suffering due to austerity" nonsense is based on.
stuck with Reaganist thinking? Such as? Perhaps you're referring to deficit spending. But as Richard's analysis shows, there's more to economic policy than that.
Good point.
I would think so, the German and French bonds were selling at 1% or something ridiculous when stimulus was needed. Later on when there was a depression looming on securities, the European Central bank went on wilder spending spree even than the Fed I believe. It was called "Quantitative Easing", not "stimulus", and interest rates were even more ridiculous (even negative at times).
The takeaway is that if you spend public funds for capital markets (i.e. for the rich), then there is no problem. It's when you spend for the poor, especially if Greek, that all of a sudden a lot intra-european racism and hawkish ideology made it impossible to have a decent stimulus, while the U.S steamed ahead out of its recession.
But, Covid + Putin and seemingly better U.S. policies may have changed views quite a bit since then.
As an European from an ex Communist country and a clear-eyed capitalist who actually works as a lobbyist for an American company in Brussels. The best balance is between US and Europe. There are elements that should be left to the state (US healthcare costs on average 2x more than European with similar outcomes while countries like Belgium are miles ahead of US on healthcare), there are areas where more regulation is needed (such as actual pollution from factories for example), as well as on individual protection (such as from cold-callers which we dont have at all or ridiculous American personal finance system with high charges and shit services or from shit food that makes Americans crazy obese). On the other side Europe needs much more economic freedom on personal bankruptcy, financial markets and overall less regulation. We also need to find a way to attract actually useful immigrants. Finding the balance is hard. But focus on GDP and population growth only is ridicolous. Alabama might have higher GDP than Belgium, but find me one actually educated person who would live in Birmingham, Alabama versus Antwerp or Brussels. Add to that lower crime rates, longer life spans, higher happiness accounts and realistically, just more fucking style, and there are things US could learn too. So give me balance between the two, and u got yourself a perfect country.
Your comment about labor unions makes sense for government protected unions. But without government protection, aren't labor unions a natural part of a free economy? Why can bosses associate freely, but workers can't?
That’s not how private sector unions work. Government prevents businesses from firing them and forces them to deal with the union cartel. Unions are unworkable under freedom of association. And bosses can’t associate freely, the law prevents business cartels working together.
Right, but what if the government *didn't* prevent businesses from firing them and such? Ie, what if the government didn't recognize unions at all? When unions began, they weren't recognized by the government.
What I mean is, in a free economy, can't workers organize themselves and plan collective action with no government sanction?
I’d allow them to do it, but in the real world they just don’t work without government favoritism. Show me current societies where unions work without government sanction.
If a union can capture the state, it will. Just like how big businesses all sought to receive government incorporation. This doesn't mean big business is impossible without government favoritism, but rather the opposite, business did so well that it received legal concessions.
So no, I can't show you current societies where unions have been successful but received no protections. But look at the achievements, for example, of the wobblies in the first decades of the 20th century.
The market for wages doesn't function the way the market for goods and services does. If I want to maximize my earnings, I would need to be willing to move every couple of years, uprooting my family and forcing my spouse to leave their job as well. We can't maximize our wages without lowering our over-all life happiness. That's why having unions is critical to balancing the scales, and why it can actually improve business by lowering turnover, which is costly.
> shouldn't you also support making legal parenthood--and thus child support--completely voluntary? After all, forcing someone to be a child's legal parent when they never had any intent or desire to be/become one also violates freedom of association, does it not?
This is off. Parenting is already completely voluntary. Child support will be forcibly taken if they can find you, and transmitted to the other parent, but this isn't characterized as an associational concern and doesn't have the characteristics of one.
No? You'll get better results, trying to discuss things with people, if you define words in conventional ways.
Well here is the obvious leftist rejoinder:
Leftist politicies are not designed to improve the average standard of living, they are designed to improve the standard of living for the worst-off. These people contribute least to GDP and are least likely to be able to vote with their feet, but their lives still matter. From the leftist's perspective, this whole analysis misses the point because it judges leftist political projects by rightist standards of success.
Of course if you could show that the worst-off Americans do in fact move states as often as the median American, or otherwise demonstrate that leftist politicies are failing in their goals of protecting the vulnerable, that could be a conversation. In fact I am confident you could show that, and that a leftist could find problems with that analysis, and so on. To some extent this is a philosophical difference, but without analyzing the effects of policies on the worst-off, this analysis is unlikely to be persuasive to anyone with even moderately bleeding-heart sensibilities
You could also show that the bottom 20% of Americans are materially way better off than the median citizen of a socialist country
But the bottom 20% are clearly better of in Europe then USA by simple measurements like how long they live. It not possible to compare on pure economic measures when reasonable universal healthcare is so important.
Also lot less likely to get shot or killed in car accident in Europe.
obesity and race explain most of the small life expectancy gap between US and europe. There is no evidence that socialized healthcare improves life expectancy. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/map-of-global-obesity-trends/
California used to be Republican leaning. In Carl Oglesby's "The Yankee and Cowboy War", California would be in the cowboy coalition with Texas. As the Texan economy & population grows, it could go the way of California. Garett Jones has been commenting on that happening in Virginia/North Carolina due to population movement. https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1780639908756881853
> If you don’t believe that government should run the steel factories, why then should it run education?
One possible argument is that even private education isn't socially valuable.
> What about health care?
The argument for the NHS that since health spending (public or private) is mostly wasteful, might as well just enforce cheapness.